The cover, with a man coiling a rope, and the title, “Sixty Meters to Anywhere,” make Brendan Leonard’s memoir look like an adventure-packed tome to curl up with at home, safe from the sorts of harrowing near-death tales that lie within.

That’s true. But it’s not the whole story.

The Denver writer’s book opens in a jail cell in Iowa. The thing that threatens to kill him isn’t a cliff face or mountain. It’s alcohol.

“By then, I already knew how handcuffs fit,” Leonard writes in the first chapter. “Real tight.”

He delivers on the grand and frightening outdoor adventures in “Sixty Meters,” too, but this isn’t just a climbing memoir, Leonard says. It’s about getting your life together, figuring out who you want to be — and how to get that.

“I want it to be universal,” he says. “The reason I think you write anything like that — or at least, I do — is to help people. So I hope it reaches more than climbers.

“As I said in the book, when I got out of substance-abuse treatment, I needed to find something else, and I hope everyone in that situation finds something else, whether it’s climbing or needlepoint or writing.”

Leonard is touring for the book right now; his next Denver appearance is at the downtown REI on July 20.

“What does it take?”

Leonard hadn’t been old enough to drink legally for very long before he landed in rehab in Iowa, where he grew up. After treatment and a short stint of time served, his parents helped him whisk away to Missoula, Mont., where he’d been accepted into graduate school for journalism.

In Missoula, he didn’t know anyone, and he couldn’t go out for a drink after class with his fellow students. He chain-smoked from his apartment balcony and guzzled coffee and watched students heading out to party.

“Loneliness made me want to drink, to go inside bars and find a seat and somebody — hell, anybody — to talk to. But everything made me want to drink,” he writes of that time in “Sixty Meters.” But when his cousin visits and takes him to Glacier National Park for a backpacking trip, the sky cracks wide open for him.

“Could I come back here? What does it take to be a person who does this stuff every weekend? Can I be in the mountains again, and breathe the air, and feel small?” he writes.

Meanwhile, one of his professors had a conversation with him. What do you want to write about? she asked. “I told her, I’ve been through substance-abuse treatment, and I’d been in jail,” he says. She told him that sounded like a good story. He started writing.

He finished his first draft of the memoir in 2009, “and got rejected like 50 times,” he says with a laugh. “So I put it away for awhile.” Mountaineers Books picked it up in 2014; it was published this past May.

Outdoor pursuits became integral to his recovery, but throughout the memoir, there in the background is his family. His brother gave him his first climbing rope — it was 60 meters, a standard length for rock climbing. At first, he wasn’t sure why his brother gave it to him, since he didn’t rock climb. Later, he realized that his brother knew what he needed to do better than he himself did.

Those themes of recovery, climbing and family are what people tend to remember from the book, he says. At book signings and through notes, readers have told him the parts about his grandmother hit home. “Other people at book signings will come up and say they’ve been sober for two years or six years, which is a cool thing,” he says. “I met a mother who is her 13-year-old daughter’s best climbing partner.” (Leonard became his mother’s climbing partner.)

Fans of his outdoor stories — whether at his website Semi-Rad.com, or in the Dirtbag Diaries podcast, or in Backpacker or Climbing magazines — might have missed his past addiction, or that it in some ways led him to these healthier obsessions. But they’ll recognize his wit in “Sixty Meters,” and his honesty about fear.

He thinks “we have a culture of not feeling; we don’t want to deal with what we’re feeling,” he says. “A lot of people use drugs, social media nowadays. I don’t have to think anymore. I can scroll through my (social media) feed … .

“I think rock climbing was an abrupt exit from that culture. ‘I’m nervous, I don’t know if I’m good enough.’ I have all of these anxieties, and you confront that head on all in one moment — you’re at the move where you blow it and things are going to be bad. It forces me to be absolutely honest with myself: ‘I am scared right now. I am terrified.’ ”

Leonard found that focus and presence on rock, with a 60-meter rope. But other people will find it elsewhere.

“Everybody can relate to being terrified of public speaking or standing at the altar, or you’re waiting for your first child to be born, or you’re getting a new job,” he says. “And to me that’s the most relatable moment — the most human moment, for sure.”

“Sixty Meters to Anywhere.” Brendan Leonard will discuss and sign his memoir in several Colorado locations over the next few months. The next is in Denver, at 6:30 p.m. July 20 at the REI flagship store at 1416 Platte St.; free, but reservations suggested. He’ll be in Durango Aug. 9 (6:30 p.m. at Maria’s Bookshop), Telluride Aug. 10 (8 p.m. at Jagged Edge Mountain Gear), back in Denver on Aug. 11 (7 p.m. at Tattered Cover Bookstore, 2526 E. Colfax Ave.) and in Boulder Aug. 23 (7:30 p.m. at Boulder Bookstore). Full schedule at semi-rad.com/2016-tour/

There is something both devastating and cautiously transformative in the memoir “Hunger,” by Roxane Gay, and I write these words, I want to tread carefully, because there is such vulnerability in these pages.